BobKrumm.com » Ethicshttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog
BobKrumm.comMon, 10 Aug 2015 19:53:34 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5Fences work both wayshttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2015/01/fences-work-both-ways/
http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2015/01/fences-work-both-ways/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 17:55:01 +0000bobhttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/?p=3114Because we always must heed the law of unintended consequences, Americans–particularly Republicans–probably should be more circumspect in their calls for the government to erect a border fence.

We live in a time when the American economy no longer is a beacon to the world’s entrepreneurs and when members of both parties want to implement laws inhibiting American companies from relocating overseas.

It would be a shame if a border fence, once built, wasn’t necessary to keep foreigners out, but instead became a convenient means of keeping Americans in.

]]>http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2015/01/fences-work-both-ways/feed/0This is what war looks likehttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/12/this-is-what-war-looks-like/
http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/12/this-is-what-war-looks-like/#commentsFri, 05 Dec 2014 17:55:52 +0000bobhttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/?p=3088Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised New York City a war on smoking. War is what they got.

While it didn’t do so explicitly, New York’s progressive government decided that smoking was so bad that it was worth killing over. You may accuse me of hyperbole, but consider that when government passes and enforces any law, it has taken the decision to use the State’s coercive powers against the non-compliant. Above is a picture of what the law’s coercive powers look like, what a war on smoking looks like. The “war” in this picture does not look like hyperbole to me.

The law that led to Eric Garner’s death was a prohibition on the selling of loose, untaxed cigarettes. In other words, Eric Garner was a bootlegger.

Any time that government restricts a willing buyer and a willing seller from agreeing upon a price, a black market will develop. It is a rule as old as mankind. During the first Progressive era, the rule was Prohibition and the black market was big.

Eighty-eight Christmases ago sixty New Yorkers lay violently ill in the hospital. Eight already had died. The culprit was poisoned alcohol. But the criminal mind behind the culprit was the government itself.

During Prohibition, alcohol still could be produced. It was needed in the manufacture of paints and solvents. So to legally produce it, the government required it to be “denatured”. Usually that was done with the addition of poisonous methyl alcohol. But it was a simple chemist’s trick to turn methyl alcohol into ethyl alcohol, which could then be drunk. By 1926, thousands of amateur chemists were performing that trick and thereby skirting Prohibition’s rules. They had to be stopped. It was the law, after all, and the law had to be enforced. So the federal government required the addition of toxic chemicals in industrial alcohol. The additives included kerosene, strychnine, and formaldehyde. All are highly poisonous if ingested. By Prohibition’s end an estimated ten-thousand drinkers were dead.

The ten-thousand were collateral damage. Nay, they were actively violating the law. They weren’t just innocent bystanders, but were enemy combatants in the war on drink. They deserved to die. After all, they were violating the law. And if we shrink from enforcing the law, people will cease to have respect for it.

Over the last dozen years, New York City was the central front in the second progressive era’s war on smoking. Mayor Bloomberg was that front’s field marshal. He raised the legal age to purchase cigarettes to 21, prohibited smoking in all restaurants, attempted to prohibit it in parks and even apartments, and both he and his successor increased taxes step by step to an absurdly high$5.85 per pack. At that price the black market is big. But all this was necessary, Bloomberg and Deblasio have said, because 6,000 New Yorkers die every year from the effects of smoking.

In the war on smoking Eric Garner was an enemy combatant. And for that offense, the supporters of New York’s war on smoking determined that he deserved to die. I trust they’re happy with the result.

]]>http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/12/this-is-what-war-looks-like/feed/0Who you calling stupid?http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/11/who-you-calling-stupid/
http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/11/who-you-calling-stupid/#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2014 16:14:39 +0000bobhttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/?p=3076Jonathan Gruber is right. The American people are stupid. But not all Americans.

Take the President’s much recently heralded “climate change” agreement with China as an example.

Brad Plumer at Vox says, ”This is a significant shift in climate politics — and possibly a first step toward a broader global climate agreement.”

James West at Mother Jones enthusiastically announces, “The announcement between the two biggest emitters deals a blow to the oft-stated rhetoric that the US must wait for China before bringing domestic climate legislation.”

The Washington Post’sStephen Stromberg gushes, that this “landmark agreement . . . does not merely commit the countries to trajectories they are already taking. It will require both nations to push harder toward cleaner energy.

According to these reports, the agreement with China was, what one Vox headline writer called, a BFD.

But was it? What exactly was agreed to?

Nothing actually. The United States and China both made non-binding pledges to reduce greenhouse gasses. However, neither side agreed to an enforcement mechanism. There is no treaty agreeement to be submitted to the Senate for ratification. There are no laws that Congress will consider. There are not even any proposed steps that the EPA could take.

Not everyone was fooled by the Administration’s announcement and the breathless fawning of his media sycophants. RedState’s Erick Erickson nailed it: ”Like so much of President Obama’s decisions over the past six years, this is another photo-op with a compliant press that does not matter and will do little.” David Harsanyi says that “there are two problems with treating the deal as big news. 1) We’re not really doing anything we weren’t going to do anyway. 2) Neither is China.” Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) called it a “non-binding charade”.

If you understand anything about the American Constitutional system and have any inkling about the current political situation in Washington you must conclude that Inhofe is right. This entire hullabaloo is a charade. International agreements can only receive the imprimatur of law by being subjected to Senate ratification requiring a two-thirds agreement. Now that the new Senate will contain only 46 Democrats, this would require that 21 Republicans join all Democrats. In fact, there isn’t even a treaty for submission to the ratification process. And the last one (Kyoto) was never submitted, because then-President Clinton knew it would fail. Laws restricting carbon consumption must go through the House that is more Republican than at any time since Calvin Coolidge was still alive. The Supreme Court has already limited what the EPA can do without additional authorizations from Congress–which is not going to happen at least before the end of the Obama Presidency.

So any objective reading of the recently announced agreement between China and the United States should be met with no more than a shrug. President Obama can announce anything he likes, but without a valid enforcement mechanism, it’s just words.

But let us get back to Gruber who called it “the stupidity of the American voter” who could easily be misled by promises grounded in economic lies and obscured by a lack of civics knowledge. That worked to get Obamacare passed, and it apparently is working in getting the Left thrilled about the President’s war on carbon. But it is not all of the American voters who are so easily duped. It apparently is only the stupidity of the President’s supporters who are so easily misled by words without substance.

In other words, the Left might want to keep in mind that Jonathan Gruber wasn’t calling all Americans stupid. He was calling the President’s supporters stupid.

Appearing on an academic panel a year ago, [Jonathan Gruber] argued that the law never would have passed if the administration had been honest about the fact that the so-called penalty for noncompliance with the mandate was actually a tax.

“And, basically, call it ‘the stupidity of the American voter,’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass,” Gruber said.

He called you stupid. He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us—Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and poor; white and brown; men and women.

Liberals should be the angriest. Not only were they personally deceived, but the administration’s dishonest approach to health care reform has helped make Obamacare unpopular while undermining the public’s faith in an activist government. A double blow to progressives.

Progressives believe that they know better than others how others should live their lives. That makes Progressivism inherently anti-democratic and requires that its adherents subvert truths and manipulate rules to advance their ends.

Democratic governments follow where their people lead. Progressive governments—those led by people who see popular opinion as wrong—lead their people in a direction that they do not want to go. When the subterfuge is discovered, or when the unpopular project spectacularly fails, popular opinion turns viciously against the Progressive.

What Fournier gets wrong is that he de-links the lying from progressivism. They can’t be separated. That is because progressivism cannot survive without the lies–at least not in a democratic society.

Definitionally, progressivism is the belief that an enlightened elite knows better how people should live their lives than the people know themselves. The progressive views government as a tool for leading the populace toward change, whereas the democrat (small “d”) views government as responsive to what the people want. In other words: a democratic government does what the people want it to do, while the progressive government demands that the people do what it wants them to do, whether they want it or not.

When a minority wants the government to do what a majority does not wish to do, the minority has a choice: it can make the case to persuade, or it can lie. Since progressivism requires that the majority subvert its will to what its leaders want, its only option, if progressivism is to succeed, is to lie.

Even as he supported the intent of the law, Fournier finally admits “Obamacare was built and sold on a foundation of lies.” If he takes a step back, he will have to see that it is not just Obamacare that is built on a foundation of lies; it is progressivism itself.

So, contra Fournier’s assertion, the progressive will not be bothered at all by Gruber’s lying–except for his having been caught. The question facing Ron Fournier going into the future, is that now that he has found himself duped by the Administration and its allies’ lies, will he allow himself to play the part of the useful idiot the next time?

Obamacare was “a very clever, you know, basically [sic] exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”

]]>http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/11/progressivism-cannot-win-without-useful-idiots/feed/0Why not barbed wire and guns?http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/08/why-not-barbed-wire-and-guns/
http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/08/why-not-barbed-wire-and-guns/#commentsWed, 06 Aug 2014 15:01:06 +0000bobhttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/?p=2886I remember when I was a young Soldier in Germany and America stood against the idea of countries erecting walls to keep people from leaving.
]]>http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/08/why-not-barbed-wire-and-guns/feed/0Means have no meaninghttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/03/means-have-no-meaning/
http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2014/03/means-have-no-meaning/#commentsWed, 26 Mar 2014 17:35:58 +0000bobhttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/?p=2862Jim Geraghty pens a controversial piece wherein he opines that liberals are more tolerant of the hypocrisy of other liberals than are conservatives. Before I get to that portion of his argument, I’d like to address his conclusion with an historical analogy. Geraghty writes:

“As long as a particular position or stance lets progressives feel good about themselves, they will embrace it. Thus the measuring stick of Obamacare is not whether it’s actually providing the uninsured with health insurance . . . but whether a liberal feels that it’s a sign that he cares about the uninsured more than other people.

Liberals will deem Obamacare a failure only if it stops making them feel good about themselves.

The original Progressives advanced another misbegotten law that made them “feel good about themselves”, even while it destroyed the country. That law was Prohibition. In 1925, H.L. Mencken observed,

“Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.”

It would be another eight years after what was obvious to Mencken was finally obvious enough to Progressives that Prohibition was repealed. And even then, it was not the obviousness of the chaos created by Prohibition that turned Progressive minds. It was the fact that by 1933 Congress finally got around to re-apportioning districts–a decennial requirement that was purposefully (and unconstitutionally) ignored following the 1920 Census, because Progressives knew that if they counted the nation’s newly arrived Catholics and Jews, that their beloved Prohibition would have gone to an earlier grave.

Still, even after Prohibition died with the 21st Amendment, Progressives consoled themselves with the belief that it was a “noble experiment”.

Bullshit.

There was absolutely nothing noble about Prohibition or about its supporters, who employed more dastardly tactics even than just using unconstitutional measures to over-represent the nation’s more rural (dry) areas instead of its burgeoning urban (wet) cities.

Daniel Okrent catalogued just some of the evils that Prohibition’s adherents used to advance their cause. They actively cultivated the support of both flavors of racists, typified by the overtly bigoted Arkansas congressman John Tillman, as well as soft bigoted paternalists like the United Methodist Church which explained in an official publication that “Under slavery the Negroes were protected from alcohol, consequently they developed no high degree of ability to resist its evil effects.” They encouraged anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism, as both religions were associated with alcohol’s manufacture, sale, and consumption. They stirred up nativism, specifically directed against Irish, Italians, and Jews. They not only allied with a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, they made the modern Klan and purposefully harnessed its hatred in order to enjoy the benefits of the fear unleashed by strong arm tactics that closely resembled those of Nazi brownshirts a decade later.

Most unforgivably of all, Progressives attacked all things German as war began on the Continent. A year after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress and claimed that those Americans “born under other flags . . . poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” The metaphor was well-chosen. While not an avid dry himself, Wilson wanted those supreme executive powers that only war could bestow. If that meant further stoking nativism to bring those zealots closer to his aims, then so be it.

Yes, what I am saying is that early Progressives supported their cause so fervently that entry into World War I–the single most disastrous American political mistake of the last hundred years–became a desirable means of achieving their Prohibitionist ends.

And all of what I just described is the horror that occurred before Prohibition’s enactment. History tells us full well the terror unleashed as a result.

Those early 20th century Progressives are the intellectual forebears of modern Progressivism. Therefore, it should surprise us not that a movement which allegedly supported greater democratization in the form of the Nineteenth Amendment’s extension of the franchise to women, also purposefully blocked blacks from the polls and diminished the value of an urban immigrant’s vote. Women supported prohibition; blacks and immigrants did not. Hypocrisy has a long pedigree in progressive politics.

In an answer to his own question “Why [is it] so hard to make progressives live up to their own rules?” Geraghty comes close to the truth when he says that Progressivism is about making progressives “feel good about themselves”. But even closer to the truth is this oft-quoted observation from C.S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Progressivism is the belief that they know better than others how others should live their lives. There is nothing that they won’t do, there is no ally so abhorrent, there is no rule so inflexible, that a Progressive won’t embrace the unthinkable to advance their cause. That is because they do so with the approval of their conscience. (As an aside, this is why some strands of “Christian” conservativism have far more in common with Progressives than they do with most conservatives.)

In short, the end justifies the means–even if that end is measurably (as in the case of Prohibition and Obamacare) worse than the beginning. Adherence to means has no meaning in the progressive mind.

Bob Shlora of Alpharetta, Ga., was supposed to be a belated Obamacare success story. After weeks of trying, the 61-year-old told ABC News he fully enrolled in a new health insurance plan through the federal marketplace over the weekend, and received a Humana policy ID number to prove it.

But two days later, his insurer has no record of the transaction, Shlora said, even though his account on the government website indicates that he has a plan. . .

Obama administration officials acknowledged today that some of the roughly 126,000 Americans who completed the torturous online enrollment process in October and November might not be officially signed up with their selected issuer, even if the website has told them they are.

It obviously is a bad thing to lose health insurance even if the prospect of needing it is just a theoretical abstraction. It is far worse for that abstraction to become a concrete reality. If, after January 1st, many thousands of Americans find that they need the health insurance that they think that they signed up for, then the Obama administration is going to be pining for the days when their approval ratings were in the low 40s.

This ABC News report suggests that the “fix” now being touted by the White House is actually a front-end website that isn’t connected to a back-end that can deliver the ordered product. We’ll know soon enough. But nothing about Obamacare to this point should give anyone any confidence that we won’t be seeing scores of tragic stories of procedures denied, prescriptions unfilled, and deteriorating medical conditions.

]]>http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2013/12/gma-is-your-obamacare-enrollment-real/feed/0ProhibitionCarehttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2013/11/prohibitioncare/
http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2013/11/prohibitioncare/#commentsMon, 18 Nov 2013 15:41:57 +0000bobhttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/?p=2822Prior to the disastrous implementation of Obamacare, has there ever been a law that fell that so far out of disfavor that the American people clamored for wholesale repeal? Yes, it was called Prohibition.

The parallels between Prohibition and Obamacare begin with the fact that both laws were the culmination of decades of “Progressive” ideals. A century ago Progressives believed that people would be better off if they were able to control what individuals were allowed to buy and sell. Modern Progressives are no different. From its first attempt in Maine in the 1850s, Progressives in both parties worked tirelessly to extend anti-alcohol laws to the entire country. This most recent bout of progressivism began sixty years ago with Democrat Harry Truman, who pushed the idea of socialized medicine. The movement received considerable advancement from Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who created Medicare, Republican George W. Bush, who added prescription drugs coverage, and Republican Mitt Romney, who built the first Obamacare-like system in Massachusetts.

Many Progressives of an earlier era wanted Prohibition for others, but not for themselves. The progressive United Methodist Church, which was officially dry but whose membership certainly wasn’t, said that, “Under slavery the Negroes were protected from alcohol, consequently they developed no high degree of ability to resist its evil effects.” A Collier’s editorial elaborated on this form of racial paternalism, “White men are beginning to see that moral responsibility for the negro rests on them, and that it is a betrayal of responsibility to permit illicit sales of dangerous liquors and drugs.” These were the attitudes of “Wet-Drys,” people who themselves drank, but who didn’t want “others” to drink. Besides racism, anti-Catholicism was rampant among earlier Progressives. Germans, Italians, and Irish (and let us not forget anti-Catholicism’s sibling, anti-semitism), flooded America’s cities during this period–and they all drank! Modern progressives similarly want Obamacare for thee, but not for me. Most infamous is that Congress specifically exempted itself and its employees from the new Obamacare requirements when it passed the law. Favored Progressive partners too–especially unions–have asked for, and gained their own Obamacare exemptions. Hypocrisy enjoys a long pedigree among Progressives.

Electoral chicanery is another similarity. There was a rush to enact the Eighteenth Amendment before the 1920 Census resulted in redistricting that would give more House seats to the cities and the immigrant Catholics who lived there. Following the census, which recorded a 21% population increase largely as a result of immigration, there was so much concern that “Wets” would gain the upper hand in Congress as well as in state legislatures, that Congress was never redistricted in accordance with the Constitution. Until 1933 when Prohibition was finally overturned, the House was stuck with the same district lines that were drawn back in 1910. A century later, modern Progressives played similar games after Republican Scott Walker Brown’s surprise election to the Senate from Massachusetts meant that the House bill enacting Obamacare could not be ratified. Instead, an earlier Senate bill, that was nowhere near to ready for implementation and which had not gone through a conference committee, was accepted without modification in the House, and in defiance of the Constitutional provision that revenue bills had to originate in the House.

In 1925 H.L. Mencken observed:

“Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.”

More than three years after the passage of Obamacare, one could make similar observations: there is not greater health insurance coverage but less; there is not lower health care costs, but more; and certainly, respect for the law–even from the law’s namesake and executor–has not increased, but diminished.

There is a final similarity which I am afraid might also come to pass. While it is popularly believed that the 18th Amendment was repealed, that was actually not exactly true. The 21st Amendment did not return things to the way they had been. Instead of repeal, the modfication to the Constitution gave the States special power to legislate alcohol. Because the Amendment gives the States jurisdiction, alcohol is not afforded protection under the interstate commerce clause. Each state can, and does, tax interstate sales, while they prevent residents from acquiring alcohol across state lines. This, and a whole host of other state restrictions, has created a hodge podge of laws that makes life difficult for wine-makers, retailers, and consumers alike. The only beneficiaries of such legal confusion are the descendants of Prohibition’s bootleggers who are now ensconced in legally mandated monopolies.

Similarly, when Obamacare meets its demise, it is unfortunately likely to die in such a way that the successor system will leave Americans worse off than they were before Obamacare ever became law. I hope that on this latter prediction, I am proved wrong.

]]>http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2013/11/prohibitioncare/feed/2The end of logichttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2013/11/the-end-of-logic/
http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/2013/11/the-end-of-logic/#commentsWed, 13 Nov 2013 19:38:19 +0000bobhttp://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/?p=2805Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is in a bit of trouble for making this statement in his Monday column:

People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

While there is some, surprisingly, the bulk of the criticism does not come from the Right for having been portrayed as knuckle-dragging dinosaurs whose acceptance of Justice Clarence Thomas’ biracial marriage and former VP Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter belie Cohen’s stereotype un-updated since the Archie Bunker era.

No, it’s actually the Left that has most criticized Cohen. The Huffington Post said, “Dear Washington Post: Please fire this man.” Esquire put Cohen in the “Newspaper Stupid Top 40.” Paul Farhi catalogues some of the others who voice umbrage at Cohen’s remarks, including Gawker, Slate, Salon, and MSNBC. All this “venom-spewing” as Farhi said, from ”people who should be [Cohen's] allies.”

Sadly, this is normal for the Left. Who could forget their outrage directed toward radio host Bill Bennett when he was asked about a statistic from the then recently-published Freakonomics that said that crime has gone down because of abortion:

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don’t know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don’t know. I mean, it cuts both – you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well –

CALLER: Well, I don’t think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don’t think it is either, I don’t think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don’t know. But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

The Leftists at Media Matters had a field day with Bennett’s comments even when their excerpts clearly exhonerated (highlighted above) him of the thought-crime of advocating the racial infanticide that they say Bennett advocated.

Bennett was engaging in the logical device known as reductio ad absurdum, whereby an argument is reduced to an absurdity so as to demonstrate the fallacy of the premise. It just so happens that last night I mentioned to my seventh-grade son the classic reductio ad absurdum: A Modest Proposal, wherein Jonathan Swift argues that to eliminate the surplus population of beggars, the Irish should be allowed to sell their unweaned children to be used as stew meat.

In 1729 Swift’s reader’s quickly recognized the essay as satire. Sadly, I don’t think that American Leftists today would be able to understand the argument. If their umbrage toward Cohen–who clearly was not advocating discrimination against biracial and gay couples—is any indicator, were Swift to write his classic today, MSNBC would surely charge him with cannibalism.

Prior to this week I could have dismissed Leftist outrage directed at Bennett as political fanaticism akin to the fanatic football fan who, even upon seeing the slow-motion replay, yells at the referee for blowing a call that he clearly called correctly. Heretofore, I could have accepted that Bennett’s detractors understood his argument but purposefully misconstrued it so as to appeal to Low-Information Voters who might have heard only an edited version of the exchange. Now as a result of the outrage that the Left directs against its own Richard Cohen, it is obvious that the Left isn’t trying to appeal to Low-Information Voters, but is instead made up of a large swath of Low-Intelligence Voters.

How else could one explain Obamacare? Many of the people who are incapable of understanding Cohen’s argument are the same ones who are logically incapable of understanding that Obamacare could not work the way the President promised. Unless you believed, as one commenter noted, that Obamacare was powered by “unicorn farts and pixie dust,” it was always completely illogical to believe that more people could get more health coverage without some people paying higher prices or being kicked off of their existing plans.

But, of course, this means that some Americans would not only lose their plans and access to their doctor, but in the case of particularly healthy individuals, reform could yield higher premiums. Beyond that, reforming such a huge chunk of the U.S. economy necessarily leads to often unanticipated changes for millions of Americans.

Acknowledging that reality would have been the honest thing to do. So would asking healthier and wealthier Americans to sacrifice for the greater good of ensuring every American have health-care coverage.

But doing so would have opened Obama and his democratic allies up to the charge that Obamacare would lead to widespread dislocations — and made the path to reform that much politically harder to traverse.

Indeed, this is precisely the argument that was made by Republicans . . .

In other words: Everything Republicans told you about Obamacare was true, but–and these are Michael Cohen’s words–you “can’t handle the truth.” What he didn’t say but is clearly implied and could have appended: “And we know that you are too stupid and too illogical to figure out the truth on your own.” Logical fallacy abounds on the Left, and this Cohen actually celebrates it.

This is where the modern Left is today: at the head of an easily manipulable cadre of useful idiots. To be sure, the Right has its share of blind adherents as well. To some, the words “abortion” and “homosexual” are like red herrings to a dog: they quickly distract. But I’m hard-pressed to find so glaring an example as Obamacare to demonstrate how easy it was to dupe millions of people who should have been smart enough to know otherwise.

For years it has been fashionable in some segments of the Right to complain that America’s public schools are engaged in indoctrination instead of education. But the Left’s slander of Richard Cohen might point at a reality far worse. It’s not that millions of Americans have been taught the wrong things–bad lessons can be unlearned. Much worse is the possibility that many millions of Americans have never been taught how to critically read and to logically think. If this is true, it does not bode well for the nation’s future.

It just so happens that the introductory chapter of a book I’ve been working on doesn’t just employ slavery as a simile, but actually asserts that a central feature of modern government is slavery. Undoubtedly, Mr. Bouie will take umbrage at the equivalence. But I challenge him and you to refute the assertion on logical grounds. I look forward to critiques and encourage discussion if you dare to proceed . . .

Why is slavery wrong? It’s a silly question, right? Obviously slavery is wrong. Self-obviously. So self-obviously wrong on its face that it needs no deeper explanation than that. And I, for having the temerity to ask so ridiculous a question as “Why is slavery wrong?” am marking myself as an idiot or worse. For to even ask the question calls into question the motives of the questioner.

And so I will ask it again: why is slavery wrong?

By now, Dear Reader, you have likely had one of three possible reactions. The first reaction is to stop reading, confident as you are by now that I am a crank, a fool, or a racist. If you are about to stop reading, I beg your benevolence and ask you to stay with me a little while longer. I assure you that the read will be worth the wait. The second possible reaction is curiosity. You are interested in where my train of thought might go, much like the motorist who slows down to catch a glimpse of a wreck’s carnage in the other lane. The third possibility is that I have generally piqued your interest by posing a question so easy to answer that you wonder why I intimate that the answer may be interesting.

Why is slavery wrong?

Let me first propose a few common responses to that question and then show why they are incorrect.

Slavery is wrong because it is based on racism. The 18th and 19th century American version of slavery certainly contained within it a substantial racist element. But the history of slavery goes back long before the discovery of the western hemisphere and before Sub-Saharan Africa was the major source of slaves. Over much of that time slavery had no basis in race. In ancient Rome, for example, victors imposed slavery on conquered peoples. In other times (and sadly, even today), slavery was a way to get out from under debt: one could sell oneself into bondage, or even indenture one’s child into slavery.

In such cases as these, racism is not a motive for slavery. But still, would it not be wrong to enslave your neighbor, or even your son? Of course it would. So, if slavery is wrong even when racism is not its cause, then there must still be something about slavery that is itself inherently wrong.

Another possible answer is that Slavery is wrong because it is based on violence. Certainly the history of slavery is replete with examples of labor gained at the point of a lash. However, there are ample anecdotes throughout the centuries of owners who treated slaves with care. Legion are tales of the slave whose bond with the master’s children was as tight as if the child were her own. Even romance, dare I say, love, developed between master and slave. But certainly we would argue today that the inequality of these relationships still made them wrong. For is it truly love, whether matronly or romantic, if the one giving love has no option to flee? I submit not. A mother always has the ability to leave her child. And most choose not to do so, even as their children—especially when they are teenagers—give plenty of reason why flight might be at least temporarily advantageous. A wife, too, at least in the modern world, also has the opportunity to flee. And every husband has given his wife at least one good reason why she might want to flee. However the slave, whether “mammy” or “mistress” cannot flee. If she wishes to desert that part of the relationship, she is encumbered from doing so because she does not have ownership of herself. For her, there is always the consideration, that even if she ceases being lover, she is still slave. Therefore, even without violence, or even without the threat of violence, can we not say that slavery is still wrong?

Perhaps the reason for the inherent illegitimacy of slavery has to do with remuneration. Slavery is wrong because it denies payment to the slave. But that too has not always been the case. Thomas Jefferson, as was common at the time, paid his slaves for overtime labor during the harvest season or when they performed particularly unpleasant tasks like cleaning out the latrines or sweeping chimneys. Others owners paid their slaves a piece rate on their labor to encourage productivity. Still other owners allowed their slaves to hire themselves out. The slaves paid their owner a monthly fee from their wages and anything above that they kept for themselves. Slaves with specialized skills like cabinetmaking or joinery often earned as much as white laborers under these self-hired arrangements. But even in such arrangements would slavery still not be wrong?

So even if slavery is employed in an equal opportunity manner—enslaving those of all races including one’s own, even if the slave owner cares for—even loves—his slaves and their families, even if the owner pays his slaves a market wage, why then is slavery still wrong?

One might be tempted at this point to seize the moral cop out: slavery is wrong because it is immoral. But that bit of circular logic—something is wrong because it is immoral; and it is immoral because it is wrong—does nothing to answer the question. It only substitutes another word for wrong, changing the question to: why is slavery immoral? So why then is slavery wrong?

Dear Reader, I will answer my own question this way:

Slavery is wrong because it steals from a man the only thing that is truly his: his own labor.

You see, even when the slave is the same race as the master, well treated by the master, and paid by the master, he still is not free to negotiate the conditions of his own labor. He cannot choose to work or not to work. He cannot choose where to work, when to work, and what work to do. He cannot choose the price at which he works, when the price he is offered is not worth his time, or when to give away his labor for free.

In slavery all decisions belong to the master because the master owns the slave’s labor. I think that you will agree that if the free man has the right to determine how to allocate his labor, that necessarily implies that the free man also has the right to determine when (or even if) to perform his labor. We, therefore, can employ time and labor interchangeably since the time a man spends laboring plus the time a man spends not laboring adds up to the sum total of his life.

Re-look at the words italicized above: “his own labor.” Own, it implies possession and denotes ownership. We own our time. It is ours and cannot belong to another unless we give it away or it is taken from us. But when time is taken, it is akin to slavery. This cannot be in dispute, since the taking of time is slavery.

But now I am going to introduce a third equivalent, one that is so familiar in common speak that I think that you will agree. The third equivalence is that of money and time.

“Time is money,” the saying goes. But the relationship between time and money goes much deeper than that. It is entrenched in our language. We buy time, we make time, we spend time, we borrow time, we invest our time, and we waste time. We are on our own time, losing time, or making up for lost time. We can use our time wisely or we can run out of time. If we are good, we give our time. If we are bad, we serve time. With so many idiomatic variations on the economic value of time, it should come as no surprise that time is money. But if time is money and labor is time, then does it not follow that labor is money? Yes it does.

My parents live on fifty acres of forests and hills full of trophy deer. Years ago a local plumber approached them about seeking permission to hunt on their land. My parents have never paid for a plumber since. The plumber has bartered the value of his labor—his time—in exchange for a product he desires: access to hunting land. Both the plumber and my parents could have accomplished the same trade using the intermediary known as money, but since both parties in the arrangement had something of value that the other party wanted, money was unnecessary.

Money becomes necessary, however, when one party has labor and the other party is not able to offer what the laboring party wants. If my parents lived in a city and had no hunting land to exchange, or if the plumber was a fisherman instead of a hunter, there would have been no equal exchange and undoubtedly the plumber would charge money for his labor.

One could say that because barter was an available medium in the previous example, there was no need for an exchange of money and labor. But it would be closer to the truth to say that money is actually barter delayed. If my parents did not have the equivalent of a hunting lease to offer the plumber in exchange for his labor, the plumber would have been paid money and then later exchanged it to lease hunting land. Money, therefore, is just a fungible intermediary desirable to both parties in a transaction as each tries to get something else later in exchange. Money has no intrinsic value absent its ability to purchase what the individual wants. And in a barter situation, both parties already have the desired end. My parents got serviceable plumbing and the plumber received access to huntable land.

And so now we have a fourth equivalence: Labor = Time = Money = Things.

This should be intuitive. So why did it take me two-thousand words to demonstrate the obvious: that we labor to buy the things we want? It is to establish the legitimacy of ownership and the principle of “property rights.” We “own” something because we worked for it. To take your property is the moral equivalent of taking your labor, the moral equivalent of slavery. (I also wanted to explore these relationships so as to demonstrate that time is the ultimate measure of value. But this is the subject for another chapter.)

As fraught as the word “slavery” is with its connotations and history, this is a powerful equivalence but it is nonetheless true. To steal from a man is to steal his labor just as if you had enslaved him. And if you are still bothered by that equivalence, consider this hypothetical:

Imagine that there is an average laborer. Over the course of fifty years, he worked forty hours every week and overtime whenever he could. And every payday during that half-century of labor he diligently put away twenty percent of his salary to save for his eventual retirement. Then came the day, when he was nearly seventy years old, that he walked down to the bank to see how large of a fortune he had amassed. Unfortunately, unknown to the laborer was the fact that the bank manager had just absconded with his funds. For years and years, the unscrupulous banker had moved our average laborer’s money into his own account leaving the laborer’s account completely dry.

In effect, the banker had stolen 20% of the laborer’s time—the equivalent of enslaving our average worker for ten years of his life. I am confident that having explained it to you thusly that you see it this way too. Theft is, in every effect, slavery, and the guilty banker should be treated with all the same harshness as if he had kept the laborer beneath his lash for a decade of his life.

But now having convinced you that theft is slavery, I have to inquire of you when is it okay to steal?

“Never,” I hear you respond.

Really? You may say that in theory, and you may think that you believe it now that I have demonstrated to you that the theft of one’s money and things is an exact equivalent to stealing a laborer’s most valuable resource—his time. Still, I suspect that you raise nary an objection to an everyday theft you see all around you. That everyday theft is called taxation.

“Oh, well, that’s different,” I hear you say. But is it?

Consider the plight of our common laborer. Instead of putting away 20% of his salary every year for the length of his working life, taxation takes from him that same 20% and redistributes it wherever legislators believe that his money could be better spent.

Some might argue that it is unfair to equate taxation with slavery since the laborer receives something in return for the labor he is forced to pay to his government. He receives roads, police protection, and a navy. But is that not the same argument as the defenders of slavery made when they said that the slave owner provided food, clothing, and housing to the slave and his family?

Another argument in favor of taxation is that there are “some people” who just will not operate in their own self interests. So for them government must provide services that they are too stupid or lazy to do for themselves. Again, this was a common defense made by the supporters of slavery who said time and again that slavery was actually doing some slaves a favor by providing for them what they could not do themselves.

Perhaps the argument then is that the value of what the government provides to the laborer far exceeds what the laborer could afford to buy for himself. But if that is true, it mathematically cannot be true for all. For every laborer who receives more from the government than is taken from him in taxes, there must be another laborer whose share of the spoils falls short of what he paid in taxes. And so that justification reduces to, “All must be enslaved for the benefit of some,” which is a rather unpersuasive argument.

But perhaps your argument is more basic: you object to the characterization that taxation is akin to slavery because the institution of taxation is so historically entrenched in Western civilization that it is inconceivable that it may be wrong? But is this not again the same argument as that of the slave owner two centuries ago who relied upon even the Bible for documentation that slavery was a routine and normal part of civilization? Is it not cloaking taxation in the same language that previously was used to justify slavery?

If you accept that theft is slavery—and I think that I have demonstrated that it is so—then you must accept that taxation also is slavery.

And so, Dear Reader, we have probably reached the second point in this introduction when you are ready to fold up the book and walk away. I have again demonstrated myself to be one of those crazy conspiracy nuts whom you suspect is about to regale you with tales of the unconstitutionality of the Internal Revenue Service and soon will advocate the violent overthrow of the United States. Rest assured; that is not my plan. Until mankind invents another way, the taxation of the citizenry is the only practical means of funding government.

That said, I do wish to impart upon you with this introduction the veracity of one half of a phrase that dates to Thomas Paine when he called government a “necessary evil.” Government is necessary, yes; but let us never forget that it is also evil. For to fund government requires the involuntary servitude of its citizens. Taxation is theft, theft is slavery, and slavery is inherently evil. A dollar taken from any citizen, no matter how noble the intent or how ignoble the individual from whom it is taken, is still taken. It is still theft. That tax dollar is the dollar the citizen earned by his own labors and to take it from him is to deprive the citizen of the value of his time. It is the definition of slavery.